BoostViT: Booth-Serial Skipping and Tunable Scaling for Vision Transformers

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have emerged as a dominant architecture in computer vision (CV), surpassing conventional neural network counterparts across diverse visual tasks. Despite their exceptional performance, ViTs incur substantial computational overhead characterized by high memory footprint, long inference latency, and elevated energy consumption. Current acceleration strategies for ViTs primarily focus on pruning operations or leveraging the inherent sparsity, requiring complex address control logic or position encoding. Alternatively, some software-based approaches attempt to pre-compute and separate dense and sparse matrix position encoding, while hardware solutions typically spend additional time and resources to obtain position encoding, decomposing matrix multiplications into structured forms. Through an analysis of ViTs’ parameters, we found that approximately 91.03% of the most significant bits (MSBs) are either 111s or 000s, and nearly 45% of 3 adjacent bits are identical. To leverage this characteristic of ViTs, we propose the Booth-Serial Skipping algorithm, which transforms the computation of consecutive 111 or 000 sequences into skip steps that require no additional computation time. Furthermore, the 4th to 6th bits of ViT weights can undergo aggressive scaling, enhancing the likelihood of Booth-skip operations with minimal impact on accuracy. The key innovation of this paper lies in exploiting the high proportion of naturally consecutive 0s or 1s in 8-bit weights during ViT inference and further expanding the skippable range through the Tunable Scaling strategy. At the hardware level, we develop a specialized accelerator to coordinate the proposed acceleration strategies. The processing element array in the accelerator is optimized for general matrix multiplication, it not only significantly improves the computation of multi-head self-attention but also enables resource reuse for linear transformations, ultimately optimizing end-to-end inference. Our design achieves $50.3\times $ , $21.9\times $ , $17.37\times $ , $7.47\times $ , and $1.49\times $ an average end-to-end speedup on DeiT over CPU (Intel Xeon Gold 6152), EdgeGPU (NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX), GPU (TITAN Xp), ViTCoD, and ViT-slice, respectively.